Nuclear weak-interaction rates are known to exert a prominent effect in the late stages of stellar collapse. Despite their importance, most studies to date on core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) have focused primarily on the effects of electron captures, neglecting $\beta$ decay contributions. In this work, we present the first CCSNe simulation incorporating global $\beta$ decay rates from a microscopic theory. These are enabled by a large-scale evaluation of both electron capture and $\beta$ decay rates, obtained self-consistently utilizing the relativistic energy density functional theory and finite-temperature quasiparticle random-phase approximation. Including $\beta$ decay leads to a dramatic enhancement of the pre-bounce antineutrino signal as the antineutrino emissivity increases by more than two orders of magnitude and the luminosity by a factor of 50 relative to thermal emission alone, while the average antineutrino energy increases by over 1 MeV. It is expected that these new rates could help us constrain the model uncertainties related to weak-interaction processes, improving the prediction of antineutrino signal during the final stages of stellar death.

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• Beta decay
• Electron & muon capture
• Nuclear astrophysics
• Nuclear physics of explosive environments
• Nuclear structure & decays